Every year, Missions Conference consumes Biola. And this week, the campus is crawling with activity. The 83rd annual student-led conference has transformed our corner of La Mirada into an otherworldly plethora of mission fields. What’s more, the student body stirs itself from its mid-spring torpor to help put on the largest student-run missions conference in the nation. Most of them are unpaid volunteers, giving of their time and their means in order to serve.

This is something of which all Biola students can be proud. It’s a time when we come together as a community, intrinsically motivated toward service, to provide a Christ-centered experience for the entire Biola community as well as our guests, workers from the 104 mission agencies on campus this week from around the world.

Different motives behind volunteering

These student volunteers are admirable for another, often unspoken reason as well. We approach the mid-semester conference with a crippling homework load, the looming spectre of mid-terms and the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel week of spring break dancing at the edges of our weary consciousnesses. This makes it all the more excellent of those students to volunteer their time to contribute to a vital part of this school’s culture and history. The vast majority of students involved in this week are not Student Missionary Union staff members. They are doing something out of the ordinary. They are moving away from their normal patterns of student life to give.

To be sure, not every student volunteers simply to invest themselves in this conference. For every two hours of service, each volunteer receives one conference credit. Some students volunteer the hours before Missions Conference for those credits and then go out of town for an extended weekend. And that’s okay. We’re just as thankful for their hard work.

As for the majority of student volunteers — and certainly for the Missions Conference directors and coordinators — it is obvious they care very little about the conference credit and participate through their service. The joy is in the late nights and long days of planning, scheming, decorating and praying; the satisfaction is in seeing the way in which God interacts with students in the spaces they’ve created across this campus.

To those students, we at The Chimes want to thank you for your hard work, your sacrifice and your devotion to this campus. We are enjoying the fruits of your labor this week right alongside you.